There's less than a week until the Ubuntu Developer Summit begins for Ubuntu 12.04 (codenamed the Precise Pangolin). The schedule for the event in Orlando, Florida is beginning to get filled up so here's some of what you can expect to see discussed for this next Ubuntu release due out in April.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (codenamed Precise Pangolin) is now open for development just one day after the release of Ubuntu 11.10. The Ubuntu Developer Summit for this next major Ubuntu release is also coming up in just over two weeks.

While there are many improvements to the graphics drivers in Ubuntu 11.10 and its shipping with the latest stable driver components, there are a few caveats to point out that I've come across during last minute tests this week.

Mark Shuttleworth has just revealed that the codename for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Linux release is the "Precise Pangolin", which will succeed the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" version.

This morning I shared some initial battery power consumption results for Ubuntu 11.10 from three different mobile devices. For all three of them, the power consumption on Ubuntu 11.10 was even higher than Ubuntu 11.04, which was already in a power hungry state. Before calling it a week to go handle XDC2011 matters, I ran some tests from a standard Intel Atom N270 netbook. Sure enough, Ubuntu 11.10 is doing a heck of a job at burning through power.

The Linux power regressions are not over. The power consumption with Ubuntu 11.04 dramatically increased due to a PCI Express Active-State Power Management change. This was after another major power regression in an earlier upstream kernel release. The Linux PCI-E ASPM support is still not improved, so the 11.04 power regression remains in Ubuntu 11.10 and other upstream Linux distributions shipping Linux 2.6.38+, but that's not all. The power situation in Ubuntu 11.10 is dramatically worsened.

There's been a proposal written today for a new Ubuntu release process. Under this proposed process, Ubuntu would abandon its traditional six-month release cycles in favor of monthly releases. Yep, once a month. The benefit of this proposal is that new Ubuntu features wouldn't be forced to land every six months but would land when the given feature is actually mature and ready. This is quite different from Ubuntu's current release process, but this proposal comes from Scott James Remnant, the former Canonical employee and Ubuntu Developer Manager.

Canonical's Kate Stewart set a milestone for correcting the ASPM power issue by Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1. Ubuntu 11.10 Beta will be released today, but it will not fix the Linux 2.6.38 power regression that's caused by a change in PCI-E Active State Power Management.